The Juice Laundry

Overview and Objectives

Project Overview

The primary goal of this midterm project is to give you an opportunity to apply the skills you are learning in marketing to a real-life situation, such that you end up turning consumer/customer data that you collect into significant, actionable, and interesting insights for The Juice Laundry (TJL), a local Charlottesville business that is partnering with us for the purposes of this midterm project.

The more you engage in the marketing process that this project will require of you, the better you will become at generating, disseminating, and responding to market intelligence (Kohli and Jaworski 1990). Improving your ability to perform these three core activities will in turn allow you to help companies—especially those you want to work for—achieve a market orientation and optimize the triple bottom line for profits, people, and the planet (Elkington 2018). After all, optimizing collective value (i.e., prosperity) is arguably why society engages in commerce and, as a result, marketing in the first place (Donaldson and Walsh 2015).

Company Overview

TJL is an organic juice and smoothie bar with four locations in Charlottesville, VA. Founded by UVA alumni Mike and Sarah Keenan, TJL’s mission is “to inspire healthy, organic, powerful change.” In-store signage articulates Mike and Sarah’s value proposition to customers as follows:

The Juice Laundry was founded on the concept of keeping our bodies clean and healthy, starting with what we put into them. Raw, organic fruits and veggies are nature’s medicine and the foundation of preventative health care. Whether juiced, blended, or eaten whole, fresh produce is full of life-giving nutrients and enzymes. We choose to use 100% organic ingredients, 100% of the time, because the phrase ‘organic whenever possible’ is often highly misleading. If we can’t find something organic on a given day, it won’t be on our menu. That’s our commitment to you, and to your health.

Elsewhere in TJL’s locations, the brand’s slogan “Clean Your Machine” is displayed prominently, as are the brand’s defining principles: “We are Raw. We are Fresh. We are Clean. We are Organic. We are Curious. We are Passionate. We are Transparent. We Leave a Gentle Footprint.” Missing in stores, however, are trash cans, as 100% of TJL’s packaging is either compostable or reusable.

For this midterm, Mike and Sarah are offering us “a lab of sorts” (Newman 2019), somewhere you can talk with them as well as TJL’s employees and customers; analyze data; and, eventually, see the impact of your hard work right in our backyard at the AFC, on the Corner, and in Newcomb Hall.

Objectives

Your objectives for this midterm project are threefold: (1) identify an area of TJL’s business worth looking into; (2) evaluate three alternative directions that TJL could go in in this respect; and (3) develop a comprehensive and convincing action plan that logically flows from what you learn.

Topic Identification

How should you go about identifying an area of TJL’s business worth looking into? In line with Colquitt and George (2011), you should strive to identify and address an area of inquiry that:

• Takes on a grand challenge (i.e., has a compelling raison d’être)
  • By aiming to solve a piece of a larger societal puzzle and, thus, having a compelling purpose (e.g., encouraging healthier eating habits, making commerce more sustainable).
• Catches and holds Mike and Sarah’s attention
  • By challenging their taken-for-granted assumptions and solving a mystery you uncover that has multiple plausible endings and cannot be guessed.
• Offers actionable insights
  • By estimating the potential effect of a new and important initiative and conveying findings that Mike and Sarah will be able to act on in the near term.

As is reflected on page three of the midterm report template, Mike and Sarah are interested in topics that focus on grand challenges, offer actionable insights, and peak their curiosity. With these priorities in mind, you should be well positioned to engage in the marketing process and help TJL further achieve a market orientation.

As you develop a list of potential topics to focus on, try your best to be divergent in your thinking (Peng 2018). Begin by conducting extensive research on Business Source Complete, Data Planet, Elevate, Euromonitor, Factiva, Google Trends, IBISWorld, Instagram, Mergent Intellect, Yelp, and other platforms (see the Commerce LibGuide for options). This research, which can also occur outside of TJL’s and its competitors’ storefronts at a safe distance from others, will guide you to challenges that TJL is facing [e.g., some consumers think TJL offers low value; Zeithaml (1988)] as well as promising alternatives that Mike and Sarah could consider implementing to address these challenges (e.g., launching a promotional campaign focused on transparent pricing).

• Pro tip: Be radically open minded—and productively stupid (Schwartz 2008)—as you search for challenges and strive not to let confirmation bias contaminate your findings (Gallo 2017).
  
• Pro tip: Organize your observations into datasets, such as those discussed in Chapter 12 of R for Data Science, so you can summarize them both statistically and visually (Wickham and Grolemund 2017). This process will add rigor to your analysis and the insights you generate.

Sort the alternatives you identify into buckets of the challenges they address. Then, use Colquitt and George’s (2011) prioritization framework to select three buckets (i.e., topics) that you believe are most worth looking into and highlight these topics in a topic choice decision matrix (see page 3 of the midterm report template). From here, you will arrive at the topic you believe is most worth doing further research and reporting on for your midterm project.

• Pro tip: Explain your topics clearly so that Mike and Sarah will be able to fully appreciate: (a) the challenges your topics are focused on overcoming and (b) the alternatives your research has led you to consider.

Alternative Evaluation

Focused on the topic you identify, your next objective is to, in a concise and well-balanced manner, explain the three fundamentally different directions that you believe TJL should consider going in (one of which may be related to improving the status quo at TJL). Further, you should arrive at and implement a set of criteria that you believe Mike and Sarah should use to make decisions of this sort.

With alternatives and criteria in hand, you will be able to complete a value model for decision-making purposes (Johnson 2018). I am expecting you to structure your value model using the exhibit skeleton on page four of the midterm report template. Overall, your goal should be to evaluate a set of well-balanced alternatives with a ranked set of relevant decision criteria in order to propose a course of action in a convincing manner.

On this point, you should strive to explain your alternatives clearly and define your criteria well so that the scores you assign to alternatives in your value model will seem logical. In other words, try to increase the chances that separate people (namely, Mike, Sarah, employees of TJL, and I) will more or less agree on the scores you assign to given alternative-criterion pairs and, thus, the logic underlying your strategic recommendation by explaining your alternatives clearly and defining/ranking your criteria cogently.

While analyzing and communicating insights about these and other datasets, the key is to describe the provenance of your data parsimoniously and to define the variables you are analyzing to make decisions clearly, completely, and credibly (Zhang and Shaw 2012).

Action Plan

Having made your decision, your final objective is to develop an action plan that covers relevant elements of the marketing mix (e.g., product, price, promotion, and place) seamlessly and concretely.

One of the most effective ways to create a concrete action plan is to include mock ups for executions (e.g., social media posts). Completing this objective well is important because clients need to understand what has to be done (i.e., by who, when, what, where, why, and how?) before they can accept your claims and even begin to consider implementing your recommendation. Online tools such as Canva, NordicClick, and Zeoob make it easy to develop meaningful mock ups that will bring your ideas to life.

In order to set expectations, strive to establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals (Miller 2017) that are related to consumers’ attitudes, emotions, and/or actions as well as TJL’s triple bottom line [i.e., profits, people, and the planet (Elkington 2018)].

Expectations

Content

This midterm report is your opportunity to show Mike and Sarah Keenan that you have thought critically, and in a divergent manner (Peng 2018), about their business. What should TJL’s top priority be, and why? What makes your topic significant, actionable, and interesting? What alternative approaches should TJL be considering in this area, and how should Mike and Sarah be going about deciding among these alternatives? Ultimately, your report should advocate for some sort of strategic change to TJL’s marketing mix in a well-reasoned manner.

More granularly, you should base the action plan you advocate for in your report on the shoulders of (i) a topic with an impressive anatomy (Colquitt and George 2011); (ii) a decision-making process with strong principles (Dalio 2017); (iii) analysis that you describe clearly, completely, and credibly (Zhang and Shaw 2012); (iv) a breadth and depth of analyses that you apply accurately and reproducibly (Parker 2017); and (v) stylish writing (Sword 2012).

Structure

Your report should contain the following sections: (1) title page, (2) main body (see “Content” above), (3) references, (4) exhibits, and, potentially, (5) appendices. There is no one “right” way to organize the main body of your report; however, you should think carefully about what your audience (i.e., Mike and Sarah Keenan) already knows and prioritize discussing original analysis that you have conducted over general statements about TJL’s business.

Length

The main body of your report should not exceed 1,000 words. There is no word limit for your exhibits, works cited, and endnotes.

Format

Use 1-inch margins and 12-point serif font throughout. The main body of your report should use 1.5 spacing. Your works cited, exhibits, and endnotes should be single spaced. Refer to the Interdisciplinary Project Project Description for additional details about formatting client-ready business documents.

Assessment

I will use the Case Report Rubric to assess your report, which is worth ten percent of COMM 3020, and to give you developmental feedback.

Submission

Your report is due on Tuesday, November 9 at 11:59 pm. Submit your report via Blackboard here, and use the following naming convention for the file you submit: “b#-last-first.docx” (e.g., “b5-andrews-alexandra.docx”). If you collect data or conduct analyses to inform your report, you should add this material to your submission via an electronic supplement. Use the same naming convention for this file (e.g., “b#-last-first.xlsx”). Your report and supplements should all make stand-alone sense. Deviating from the simple instructions in this paragraph will earn you a lower grade (–2 out of 100 possible points).

References

Colquitt, Jason A. and Gerard George (2011), “Publishing in AMJ–Part 1: Topic Choice,” Academy of Management Journal, 54 (3), 432–35.

Dalio, Ray (2017), Principles: Life and Work, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Donaldson, Thomas and James P. Walsh (2015), “Toward a Theory of Business,” Research in Organizational Behavior, 35, 181–207.

Elkington, John (2018), “25 Years Ago I Coined the Phrase ‘Triple Bottom Line.’ Here’s Why It’s Time to Rethink It.” Harvard Business Review.

Gallo, Carmine (2017), “A Self-Made Billionaire Reveals the 1 Mental Hurdle That You Must Overcome to Reach Your Potential,” Inc.

Johnson, Steven (2018), “How to Make a Big Decision,” The New York Times.

Kohli, Ajay K. and Bernard J. Jaworski (1990), “Market Orientation: The Construct, Research Propositions, and Managerial Implications,” Journal of Marketing, 54 (2), 1–18.

Miller, Jen A (2017), “How to Make (and Keep) a New Year’s Resolution,” The New York Times.

Newman, Caroline (2019), “Seeking a Real-World Case Study, One Commerce Professor Turned to the Corner,” UVA Today.

Parker, Hilary (2017), “Opinionated Analysis Development,” PeerJ Preprints, 5:e3210v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3210v1.

Peng, Roger (2018), “Divergent and Convergent Phases of Data Analysis,” Simply Statistics.

Schwartz, Martin A. (2008), “The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research,” Journal of Cell Science, 121 (11), 1771–71.

Sword, Helen (2012), Stylish Academic Writing, Harvard University Press.

Wickham, Hadley and Garrett Grolemund (2017), R for Data Science, O’Reilly.

Zeithaml, Valarie A. (1988), “Consumer Perceptions of Price, Quality, and Value: A Means-End Model and Synthesis of Evidence,” Journal of Marketing, 52 (3), 2–22.

Zhang, Yan and Jason D Shaw (2012), “Crafting the Methods and Results,” Academy of Management Journal, 55 (1), 8–12.